State diagram models, such as state diagrams produced with Stateflow® from The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass., are event-based and therefore reactive without any notion of time. In contrast, graphical modeling and simulation tools, such as Simulink® also from The MathWorks, Inc., provide dynamic system modeling and simulation to represent and propagate multiple sample times or rates for different components in a system. Designing and simulating with multiple samples rates for different components of the system provides for testing to ensure the integrity of data access between the different components In some cases, state diagrams may be used to schedule the execution of different components in a graphical model or simulation of the system. For example, in state diagrams of Stateflow®, temporal operators and function call outputs may be used to trigger execution of different components in a Simulink® graphical model.
While the schedulers implemented using a state diagram model allow for a variety of scheduling designs, a state diagram model does not provide for propagating multiple samples rates to drive the scheduling, triggering or execution of the different components of a simulated system. The reactive event-based nature along with the Turing-complete nature of a state diagram model, such as a Stateflow® diagram, makes it challenging to propagate the sample times to the component subsystems. Additionally, state diagram based schedulers do not execute different components of the system based on different sample rates. As such, state diagram models integrated or interfacing with a graphical model of a system for simulation limits the design, simulation and testing of various different components via multiple sample rates.